The present disclosure relates generally to a method and apparatus for power management of integrated circuit processors, and more particularly to power management of a plurality of processors in a multi-processor device having a shared thermal platform.
The thermal design power (TDP) is the maximum power that can be dissipated by a computer system. Typically, the sum of power consumed by each individual component of a system cannot exceed this TDP limit for sustained periods without risking failure or damage to the system. In order to protect the system from such a TDP violation, a power budget is typically allocated statically to each system component. Because the power budget restricts the performance of individual components (e.g., integrated circuit processors), some workload distributions will cause unnecessary performance loss when some components have TDP slack or headroom while other components' performance is limited by their associated power budget.
Some known solutions monitor conditions such as temperature and/or current of multi-processor apparatus, and have a rigid and static response when the monitored conditions of the apparatus exceed a predefined threshold. When this threshold is surpassed, individual processors of the apparatus may take protective action by stepping down to the next discrete power setting until the condition is no longer present. However, this known approach is often insufficient because of such a coarse-grained approach will often over react to the thermal event unnecessarily reducing performance, or create unsatisfactory performance variability.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved method and apparatus for controlling power consumption levels of a multi-processor system sharing the same thermal management platform.